These are for compatibility with other editors and for sophisticated activities.

It should be simple enough to implement, but the Emacs client ( /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient) seems to have problems locating the server from time to time. Emacs supports command line arguments to request various actions when invoking Emacs. Instead, I decided to use the Emacs client to start the server, if it cannot detect a running Emacs. However, I never found this to be useful. Emacs marches to a different drummer all the better. For Emacs use the sesquicolon, for other languages use the shebang. So, Emacs is already quite fit as an interpreter of scripts. In Emacs 22 (Carbon Port, CVS version) you can use the variable ‘mac-control-modifier’ to remap the Control key. The alternatives are to explicitly set command-line-args-left to nil, or call the function kill-emacs at the exit point of the script. This can be useful for Linux-like behavior when Caps Lock has already been remapped to Command.

macOS comes with a number of standard Unix command line editors, vim and emacs among them. The variable ‘mac-command-modifier’ can be used to interpret the Command key as an additional Control. If you want to run Python scripts from the Terminal window command line or from the Finder you first need an editor to create your script. To start the Emacs server, it is possible to ask macOS to launch the Emacs daemon automatically when the user logs in (see here). Python on a Mac running macOS is in principle very similar to Python on any. This was when I realized that I should investigate the client/server mode. What I wanted was for the running Emacs to open a new buffer. The problem with the emacs shell command, though, was that if I use it to open a second document, a new instance of Emacs would be launched. However, I eventually decided to switch to the GUI mode because I liked how org-mode documents are rendered in GUI mode. I used to use emacsnw exclusively, because I thought that managing an addition macOS window was a hassle.

If you’re unable to find it, try another method. If you don’t see Terminal in the Other folder, it may have been moved elsewhere in Launchpad. The Terminal application will now launch to the command prompt. Function emacs () alias emacsnw = '/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw' It’s a square icon containing several smaller icons.

Emacs for mac command line